Bright Sounds: Conversation with Laura Ortman

Broken Boxes met up with musician and composer Laura Ortman during her Artist Residency at the Institute of American Indian Arts for this episode where we chatted about her long love affair with the violin, how music has supported her in navigating the ups and downs in life and the value of the violin in contributing to collaboration and transcending art mediums. Laura reflects on how she stays centered while constantly traveling as a practicing artist and she speaks about being DIY to a fault, how she is learning to accept support from community, grants and residencies along the way. She shares about her upcoming album and the components she put forward in creating the record, including songwriting and archival field recordings. We hear a bit about a recent performance at SITE Santa Fe - which was days away when we recorded this broadcast - and where she performed a site specific performance on artist Pedro Reyes’ Disarm Violin, an instrument made from decommissioned gun parts. She spoke to the importance of long term collaborative relationships as a way to sustain community connections and combat isolation and offered some sound advice to not throw away ideas that don’t resonate in the moment, to be patient with the process, and come back to a work that isn’t quite fitting in the now. As we spoke, the artists' effect pedals and violin were set up around us and we ended the broadcast with Laura sharing a powerful live mini performance session. Laura Ortman, a member of the White Mountain Apache tribe, is a musician and composer who creates across multiple platforms, including albums, live performance, field recordings, and video works. As a soloist, Ortman performs on amplified and Apache violin, vocals, piano, electric guitar, and keyboard. She has performed and presented work nationally and internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2021); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2019); the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, Toronto, Canada (2017, 2011); Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, Canada (2017); and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2009). Ortman is a 2022 recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship.Listen to Laura’s work on Bandcamp: https://thedustdiveflash.bandcamp.com